Nightside of the Paradise
by ChevalierTialys
Summary: Tialys and Salmakia have plenty to tell the Harpies, for the stories had been their idea after all. They never expected the part they have yet to play, or the revelation of their true destinies. A story of the Gallivespians from childhood to the end of TAS and beyond. Any and all feedback helps!
1. Prologue

_Author's note:_

 _This story contains quite a few references to different esoteric belief systems: the Kabbalah and the works of Aleister Crowley, among others. All these references will be explained in detail as the story progresses!_

* * *

They entered the world in the same second; in the same breath.

Universes away, Xaphania felt their birth just as she had felt the birth of the other two. It was a sensation of pulling; of yearning; of two halves of one whole tasting their strange new world and catching one another's scent on the Dust-wind.

So she slipped through the veil between the worlds and sought out the wise ones of their race. She entered their machines and spoke to them in words of code while they rubbed their tired eyes in disbelief, for they had thought such wonders to have vanished from this world.

 _The ones without destiny have arrived,_ she told them. G _uard them well._

 _But Sephirah,_ they replied, fingers dancing on keyboards. _How shall we find them? What names shall we know them by?_

 _Do not seek them out. Guard their true names from them as well as from their enemies. But I will tell you this much:_

 _They will be named Martyrs, for they will be torn and maimed in ways your kind cannot comprehend. They will be named Babylon and Chaos, mother and father of abominations; the Whore and the False Prophet. But one day all these names will fall at their feet, and only their true ones will remain. Now listen, and know what they are:_

And the wise ones listened, and understood.


	2. The Meadow

_He does not feel himself fall._

 _Through the chaos of battle she comes to him, withered and grey but smiling, always smiling. A small white hand closes around his wrist, and he steps lightly out of the sky._

* * *

Tialys was six months old when he found out how Gallivespians kill Qelipot.

The children clustered at the tree-house window like owlets, the older ones squabbling over a pair of binoculars while the younger ones contented themselves with curling their fingers around their eyes in imitation. And, barely a minute's flight away, the meadow boiled with battle.

Flame-coloured dragonflies darted among the Qelipot, now swerving in wild corkscrews around bullets and swords, now hovering in place to let their riders leap. Poison spurs found veins; cannonballs and flaming shells the size of hens' eggs exploded among the wildflowers in blooms of fire and sunset.

A Qelipah fell, screaming then twitching into silence, and a little girl began to cry. Tialys hissed at her with such ferocity that suggested her tears were an insult to his very nature. For it was his own father, the great Chevalier Aslatiel, who led the assault.

And there he was, leaping from the dead human's neck up onto his hovering mount; bellowing orders to his men; skimming to the front as they formed a line and charged the fear-maddened Qelipot. His rapier and crossbow bolts glinted with night-adder venom; his spurs were covered with gold filigree, leaving only the deadly tips exposed. Twelve more Qelipot fell to the cannons and poisoned weapons, and as the survivors turned tail and fled and the children cheered, Tialys puffed out his chest and smiled as if he himself had led the charge.

The riders were dispersing, turning their dragonflies towards the dappled light among the trees. But Chevalier Aslatiel straightened the blue feather in his hat and made for the tree-house.

"Tialys," he called once he was within earshot, his hardened face unreadable. "Come with me."

Feeling his playmates' eyes all over him, Tialys realised with a shiver that something very important was about to happen. Usually he was "boy", or "grub" if he had been particularly naughty. So he replied "Yes, Father," in his most grown-up voice and stepped forward, attempting to mount the dragonfly hovering at the window in the most dignified way possible. Aslatiel, of course, ruined his plans by picking him up and slinging him into the saddle as if he were a sack of millet.

As they flew over the dead Qelipot, Tialys wrapped his arms around his father's waist and peered down with wide brown eyes, bewildered by the twisted purplish grimaces that stared up at him. He shut his eyes when the insect spun down at the edge of the meadow, for spinning made him feel queasy.

They landed next to a body - only a boy, Tialys saw, not that much older than himself in Qelipot-years. Crumpled in death, face pale and anguished, the thing didn't look frightening at all, and Tialys realised just how impressed his father would be if he strolled right up to it and sat down on that huge dead spider of a hand...

The Qelipah poked him in the back.

Tialys hurtled back, whimpering, grasping his father's arm, shameless with fear as the thing twitched and rolled its eyes and let out a high hopeless sound of pain.

"I didn't have enough venom for this one. You'll have to finish him for me, Tialys."

A new kind of dread squeezed Tialys' insides until he could not move or speak or swallow. Chevalier Aslatiel wasn't stupid; he knew this was impossible! It was a joke, or a test to see how brave Tialys could be, but he wasn't brave, his father was the cleverest but he'd gotten one thing wrong, for Tialys was just a dumb frightened little grub...

"I can't!" he choked out. "It'll wake up and squash me!"

"Nonsense." Aslatiel pushed him through the grass and the flowers that now smelled of death. "He'll be out for days. He might die, or he might not. Go on, son, it's easy, find that blue vein on his neck and kick down, it'll be over quick-"

Tialys did the one thing that Gallivespians never, ever do.

He started to cry.

"You want to be a Chevalier, right?" His father seized his bony shoulders and shook him until his ears rang with his own sobs. "What do you think Chevaliers are for, boy? Looking pretty? Laying about with fancy ladies? Chevaliers are for killing, and don't you ever forget that; don't you ever forget how much blood I had to spill just so you could play at being grown up, you arrogant, ungrateful little brat!"

Afterwards, as Aslatiel held him to his chest and said _you did well little grub, Father's so proud of you, you did so damn well_ , Tialys tried to pretend that it was the anger that had made him do what he did.

Meanwhile, all he felt was the human's dying breath reaching deep inside him, and tearing out something secret and precious forever.

* * *

 _"Do you know who I am, Chevalier?"_

 _Her voice is all wrong; her smile makes the sky darken, and suddenly he_ does _know._


	3. The Inferno

_She does not feel herself falling asleep._

 _He shakes her awake, but she knows it's impossible; she saw him fall and deep inside she had fallen with him._

 _The hands of the child who killed God are soft and warm. Dying in them wouldn't be so bad, she thinks._

* * *

Salmakia was six months old when she found out how Qelipot kill Gallivespians.

Later, the thing she remembered about that day was just how ordinary it had been. She rose early, stuffed some acorn bread into her pockets before her parents had the chance to wake up, and slipped out to meet the other clan children down by the pond where they swam and caught tadpoles. Salmakia wasn't much good at fishing, but, being the smallest, she could lie on top of the water for the longest time before the surface tension broke and sucked her under.

The highlight of the day came when Theo, a boy she knew liked her, caught a tadpole as long as her arm and sliced off three steaks from its tail for her to take home. She was so pleased, she decided that she did like him back after all.

In the evening, her mother, Lady Nyx, scolded her for getting so dirty and recounted terrible stories about water-weeds that twisted around your ankles and frogs with gaping mouths that could swallow a Gallivespian child whole. But she cooked the tadpole steaks just the same, and afterwards Salmakia went to bed content with her naughtiness. She fell asleep with her arms around her pet bumblebee Pollux, her face buried in his striped fur with its gentle promise of another ordinary day to come.

"Salmakia! Wake up!"

She rolled over, sinking away from her mother's voice like a fish returning to the deep. But a naphtha lamp pierced the darkness. Her blankets were wrenched off and she was bundled, protesting feebly, into a mouse-fur coat that wasn't hers.

"Are we relocating?" she asked sleepily. It was too common a thing to be frightened of. Clan Nyx did not have the fortifications and cannons of the larger clans, and so they survived by darkness and secrecy and never being bound to anywhere in particular. Even their dragonflies were drab, bred for camouflage and not for show.

"No, child. We're _running_."

And then the forest began to scream.

A million fibres cried out their anguish before splintering; Salmakia's bedroom careened sideways. She screamed as she found herself slipping, grabbing her bed and dressing-table, but those were sliding too. Her bookshelf toppled over; an encyclopaedia bounced off her forehead. Dazed, she could only stare dumbly as her mother picked her up and sprang out through the open window where Lord Nyx was waiting with the family's black dragonfly; as they flew through the roaring inferno that had once been the woods of her childhood. The tree where she had been asleep five minutes ago had collapsed. She could see her books, her collection of wooden soldiers and her fluffy squirrel doll raining out through the window, to be consumed by the flames like so much rubbish.

The dragonfly banked, and she saw the Qelipot. There were a dozen of them at least, holding flamethrowers and dressed in protective suits. All the other Gallivespians were fleeing, the thought of fighting gone from their minds. An old dragonfly burdened with a family of four was caught in a gust of flame; there was a brief choked scream, and then silence. Salmakia hugged her father's waist and fixed her eyes on the sky. It was too much to bear.

It was there that she saw Pollux.

He was hovering a dragonfly-length above her head. She saw his antennae twitching and his wings beating madly, and she knew that she could not live with herself if she left him in that hell.

"Papa, stay right here, I need to get Pollux!"

"Have you lost your mind?" Lord Nyx spurred the dragonfly; Pollux was almost out of leaping range now. "He can fly. He'll find his way back, I promise!"

A promise wasn't enough. Salmakia jumped. Her body collided with the warm furry one of her friend, and she wrapped her arms around him, forcing herself to look down. There was the dragonfly. She would land just where she had been sitting, with barely a second wasted…

…a burning branch fell; the dragonfly darted away. There was a moment when her mother's hands reached for her and Salmakia thought it would all be all right, and then she was falling.

For a second everything was noise and confusion. She fell so close to the flames, she was sure she smelled burning hair. Then a branch rushed up to meet her, striking the left side of her body. She heard the crack as something inside her shattered; comets danced in her eyes as she rolled over into nothingness.

When she hit the forest floor, it did not hurt half as much. She curled up on the damp soil and tried to remember how to breathe, but her ribcage had sprouted claws that squeezed her lungs every time she tried. She coughed, sprinkling the dead leaves with blood, and watched as Pollux wriggled out of her arms and soared into the sky. For a ridiculous moment, she thought he was her soul.

The ground shook with the sound of Qelipot approaching. Salmakia tried to stand, but her legs were jelly and her chest was so very sore. Coarse voices echoed far above; a giant boot obscured the burning trees. Salmakia pressed her face against the earth, filling her torn lungs with the familiar musk of the forest and wondering how much it would hurt.

A whirring of wings; something swung into her and sent her hurtling through the air. Through the darkness welling up in her eyes, she saw the clubbed tail of a dragonfly the colour of night. Lady Nyx's eyes burned into Salmakia's. She mouthed three words.

The boot came down on the insect and its riders.

Salmakia screamed. She did not see the luminous blue-green dragonflies bearing warriors in fireproof suits; did not hear the grenade launchers firing. Hands were lifting her, voices were crying for a medic, but it did not matter, nothing mattered any more. So she howled her pain into the burning night until darkness dragged her under like the broken surface tension on a pond.

* * *

 _Gentle hands wrap around her shoulders, forcing her to sit up. She stares into his face, but she had been wrong because it's not him after all._

" _I am your Death, my lady."_

 _She already knows._


	4. Deception

_The boy with the knife is crying._

 _The colours disappear. His body lolls grey and useless in the child's hand. He tries to tell the boy to throw it away, but he can only whisper now._

 _And so the Chevalier Tialys links arms with his death, and turns away._

* * *

The evening after the battle, Chevalier Aslatiel and Tialys prepared their supper together. Tialys knew that he ought to be happy, because usually the duty fell to him while his father busied himself with wine, and besides it was squirrel-tail stew, Tialys' favourite. Aslatiel even sent him to fetch honeycakes from the pantry. It was all being done for him, and he hated himself for feeling so hollow inside.

Tialys realised the next morning that he had been treated much like a squirrel being fattened on honey before its slaughter.

"I'm _not_ sick," he insisted, stomping as his father marched him along the suspended walkways that served the Gallivespians as streets. "so I'm _not_ going to the doctor, and I'm _not_ getting into that stupid peccatometer again, and _you can't make me!"_

 _"_ You know damn right I can!" If anything, Chevalier Aslatiel was more menacing in his street clothes than his uniform. "Now shut up and walk like a Gallivespian before I give you something to cry about!"

"But I went last month, and you _promised!"_

"How else was I supposed to make you stop whining? I'll box your ears next time. What's there to hate about the peccatometer anyway?"

"It's embarassing!"

"Know what's embarassing? Being seen with a son like you. Now walk properly or I'm counting to ten..."

Bad things happened when Aslatiel finished counting, so Tialys had no choice but to simmer in silence all the way to the doctor's office. She checked his heart, eyes and ears before making him take all his clothes off and put on a green robe that smelled of bad soap.

"Now stand very still," she said as she led him into the glass and steel chamber and began to stick cold electrodes all over his body. "You'll get a sweet afterwards."

Tialys glared at her with all his might to show her what he thought of such proposals. He continued to glare as the glass doors of the peccatometer glided shut, and the doctor sat down at the console and began pressing buttons in a rapid sequence, watching the screen while Aslatiel peered over her shoulder.

When the doctor shook her head and Aslatiel's dark brows knitted into a frown, Tialys began to worry about something other than his dignity for the first time that day.

Afterwards, he was turned out into the reception area with a piece of rock candy while the doctor spoke to his father in private. Finding the reception empty, he did the only logical thing, which was to put his ear against the door.

"...no improvement in your son's condition," the doctor was saying. "His levels of Sitra Achra activity are non-existent. There are occasional reports of such children, but they never open their eyes and always die within a few days of birth. Not only does your son live, but he experiences the world in ways only our race's contact with Sitra Achra can allow. Forgive me, Chevalier, but I simply do not understand..."

"I tried the exposure therapy as you suggested. Is there nothing that can be done for him?"

"Perhaps your son is simply... _different._ He is a bright and healthy boy, and he deserves to experience the world. Send him to an academy. I will write a letter of referral, because it is my honest belief that he is of no danger to anyone. The matter must, however, be handled with utmost delicacy. You understand, there are public perceptions to contend with. Legends of such individuals. If you do not object, I would like to continue monitoring his progress..."

When Aslatiel left the room, he found Tialys sucking absently on the rock candy, the very image of obedient docility.

"What's wrong with me?" he asked innocently as they walked home through the trees.

"Nothing. It was just a check-up."

"No, it wasn't. What's Sitra Achra? Why don't I have it?"

Aslatiel did box his ears this time.

"You little- You're grounded!"

"All right. I'll go and be grounded, and make no further fuss about it, but you must tell me what's wrong with me or I'll never trust you again!"

Aslatiel had half a mind to hit his son again, but as he took in the blazing eyes and trembling lip of his poor, precious, broken half-child, all the strength seemed to leave him. He could do nothing but sag and curse softly.

"Fine, I'll tell you about Sitra Achra. And Qelipot too, I suppose. Let's see if they taught you anything at that school of yours. How did our war with the humans start?"

"The Qelipot-I mean humans used to be our allies. We shared what we knew and fought in each other's wars." Tialys was quite used to having to prove himself whenever he wanted something. "Three hundred years ago, one of our scientists made great discoveries about space and time and the way matter's made up. The humans heard of his work and realised that they could use it to make a bomb that would be the greatest weapon there's ever been. He refused, so they killed him and made the bomb anyway.

"The humans bombed each other for twenty years while we hid and tried to survive. They destroyed everything they had. There were no more cities or technology or knowledge, so they turned to the Church instead. And the Church taught them that we had made the first bomb and tempted them to use it, like Da'at, the hidden Sephirah, tempted Eve. But they never taught us what "Qelipot" means. I guess they call us Hoppers, so we have to call them something worse."

Aslatiel laughed. "'A 'qelipah' is a shell, that's all. Our bodies and our souls are shells, but a shell has to have something living inside it, otherwise it's dead and useless. That 'something' is what we call Sitra Achra. It lives within our kind, and it lived within humans until that war three hundred years ago."

"But how can something live inside us?" Tialys cried out. "You're _you._ I'm _me._ There's nobody here but us! Unless you mean..." here he trailed off, remembering a dragonfly he had once seen die with wasp larvae bursting from its swollen abdomen and suddenly feeling sick.

"A parasite? Hell no! A symbiosis. Do you know what that word means?" Tialys nodded. "The ancients told the story of Da'at, the Sephirah of knowledge, and his rebellion against Keter, the Sephirah who crowned himself the authority above all. He came to Eve, the first Qelipah, and tempted her with what Keter had forbidden. Eve's disobedience brought duality into the world. Eve's will and the will of Keter. Knowledge and ignorance. Holiness and Sitra Achra; the nightside of the paradise. The thing some of us might call a soul."

"Does that mean Eve was a human?"

"Eve was everything, and nothing too. Eve is a metaphor and I'd be disappointed if you thought she really existed. In any case - and you'll probably learn about this in military school - the bombs from that war three hundred years ago tore holes into Ayin, the void between the worlds. Do you know the phrase _Yesh me-Ayin?_ Something from nothing. Ayin longs to reclaim everything it birthed, including Sitra Achra. And so it began to leave this world, and with it conscious thought and knowledge.

"We have our ways of preserving Sitra Achra, but the humans with their Church are terribly afraid of Eve. They wish to reclaim paradise; to be ignorant and obey and scourge themselves for their sins. They wish to be filled with holiness, but 'holy' is nothing but a fancy word for 'hollow'. They banished the darkness within them, and with it their souls. And so they became Qelipot."

It was only then that Tialys understood.

"I know now why the doctor was afraid." His chin tingled the way it usually did when he was about to cry, but his eyes were dry. The face of his father, the leaves and the bark with its black insect-holes all took on the cold clarity of the pebbles at the bottom of a winter brook. "I have no soul. I'm a Qelipah, aren't I, Father?"

Chevalier Aslatiel hugged him.

"You stupid, stupid little grub." Tialys buried his face in his father's shoulder, breathing in the scent of starched fabric and cologne, wondering whether this would ever happen again before he died. "You couldn't be a Qelipah if you tried. You're behind, that's all. You'll go to the military academy, and you'll learn our ways of preserving Sitra Achra. You're going to become a Chevalier like me, and one day you'll have stupid little grubs of your own. Heaven knows, maybe you'll have more patience for them than I do..."

"But _how?"_ Tialys asked, pulling away because for better or worse, he was grown now. _"_ How do we preserve it? Tell me and I could start right now!"

"You see, son, the problem is that it's like asking how to grow up. But in essence we gain knowledge and experience. A warrior might use his spurs to kill. An artist might create something, and a scholar might write a thesis. There are other things that grown-ups do, but you're not going to ask about them and I'm not going to tell you. Do you understand now?"

Tialys stared at the hard blue eyes of his father; at the puckered scar above his collar where a Qelipot knife had almost taken his head off, and he realised for the first time that he could not _be_ him. He could do that strange dance of kicking back with his heel to the music of a death rattle over and over until it became familiar. He could wear a blue hawk feather in his hat and cover his spurs with gold, but he would always be an empty shell-child pretending with all his might to be grown.

"Father," he said, not even sure what the words would be until they left his mouth. "Would you still care about me if I decided not to be a Chevalier after all?"

* * *

 _They walk. She speaks of love. He wonders why children cry so easily._

 _"I want to visit the holding area," he tells her. "Can you take me there?"_

 _"That place is not for you, Chevalier."_

 _"There's a house there. A house with a tin roof. We stayed the night, and we-"_

 _He stops because he does not remember the house, only the forbidden thing that they had done there. He will remember it longer than he remembers himself._

 _They walk._


	5. Ferocity

_The dragonflies are coming. The child is safe._

 _Lyra, her little Lyra, the child who had and hadn't been conceived in her torn organs, who had died long ago in the broken machinery of her womb, will live forever._

 _Her death is a gentle creature. She leads, and he follows._

* * *

There were ways in which fate had been kind to Salmakia after all. The man who had picked her up from the forest floor was Lord Roke, a clan leader and distinguished general. He watched the death of his old friend Lord Nyx from his electric blue mount, and once Nyx's daughter was safe with a medic, he saw to it that every last Qelipah died screaming.

"She suffered a ruptured spleen," the surgeon told Lord Roke the next evening as they stood beside the girl's hospital bed. "I had to remove it entirely. She also broke three ribs, which caused a minor puncture in her left lung. Physically, she should make a complete recovery.

"How long has she been sleeping?"

"She has been in shock since she arrived." The surgeon sighed wearily. "What will happen to her now, I wonder?"

The girl's gown had slipped open, revealing hideous bruises the colour of a stormy sky. Dark curls pooled like spilled ink around her white face, and Lord Roke saw that behind the oxygen mask that covered most of it, her brows were furrowed in the smallest frown.

It was that frown that made him decide that as long as he lived, she would want for nothing.

"You are a kind man, my lord," the surgeon said once Lord Roke had told him of his plans. "However, there is something you should know about this girl. Earlier today she was placed in the peccatometer to determine the extent of her emotional trauma and its effect on her development. What I found was worse than I could have expected. She has no Sitra Achra at all."

"But she lives. How is that possible?"

"Frankly, my lord, I am stumped. I have contacted all of my colleagues, and one of them has seen a boy with the same problem. He is intelligent and healthy in all other aspects. She has not been able to conduct sufficient studies on him, however. As for the girl, after what happened to her, it's impossible to tell. Perhaps she will never wake up..."

Salmakia did wake up the very next morning. She tried to fight against the oxygen mask and the drip in her hand, only to be crushed by the pain. But Lord Roke and his wife were there, and they held her hands and stroked her cheek while she wept.

Lord and Lady Roke were of the opinion that the best balm for a child's grief was the company of other children, and they had more of them than any Gallivespian couple Salmakia had ever met. They introduced themselves shyly as she sat on their sofa and blinked at her luxurious surroundings: three-month-old Adelie, Vivenne who was five, and Erimond, the eldest at eight and Lord Roke's heir.

These noble children were so different from the urchins Salmakia had once played with that for the first few weeks, she was stumped. Erimond was polite but aloof, and he was always busy learning things like fencing and political science. The two girls thought that having a foundling orphan for a sister was awfully romantic, but even though Salmakia was never excluded, the strangeness of their games only made her long for her old friends.

For one, the girls were obsessed with dolls. When Salmakia tried to explain the virtues of toy soldiers, they stared at her blankly. You couldn't sew dresses for soldiers, they said, or bake them fancy little cakes out of salt dough. Make-up and hair decorations were beloved too, but their most bizarre habit was painting their spurs with bright varnishes. Salmakia thought it was as useful as putting ribbons on a sword.

Even their pets were strange. On her first night at her new home, Salmakia had woken up half-delirious to the sound of the guest door room being pushed open. A great shaggy beast had sniffed the air and lumbered into the room. She had screamed for help, but it was only a fat dormouse that liked creeping into the children's beds.

Salmakia and the dormouse soon worked out a routine: he shared her warmth, and she gave him her sorrow.

"Pollux," she whispered as his snores thrummed through her heaving chest and his fur grew damp with her breath. "Why did you leave? Why couldn't you just trust me?"

The weeks passed. Shock became anger, and Salmakia began to wonder if the other children had been born just to punish her. They would never understand why she hated dressing up dolls and painting her spurs pink because they would never know what it meant to be truly helpless; to have all those petty comforts stripped away like fire sears the fragile outer layer of skin, exposing the raw red mess underneath.

Even their nightmares held freedoms she had been denied. Night after night she saw her mother and father's spilled organs and splintered bones, and wished with all her heart to dream about falling and spiders again.

"Teach me to kill Qelipot," Salmakia told Erimond Roke one evening as he sat in the treetop courtyard, changing the grip on his rapier. "I'll catch you some tadpoles if you do."

He only stared at her, confused.

"Why would I make you catch tadpoles if we can just buy them at the market? Besides, I've never killed anything."

"All right, I'll be your slave. I'll do anything you tell me to. Please, Erimond, I need to learn to fight or I swear I'll go mad..."

Beneath his smile lay the disgust of someone being told to pet a mangy stray.

"All right," he said, picking up his rapier and putting it through a series of contortions to test the new grip. "You'll need to learn the stances first. Bend your knees - no, not that much! Now put your right foot forward at ninety degrees to your left..."

It took the entire evening for Salmakia to be able to step without wobbling. The next day they worked on lunging, and the first two parries after that. Still, Salmakia felt as if she had learned nothing apart from how to find revulsion in any smile.

A useful skill too, she supposed.

"Why do you hate me so much?" Salmakia asked Erimond one day after he had demonstrated a flying strike using a swaying branch and an old chair.

"Why would I hate you?"

"You barely speak to me. You refuse to hit me when we train. And you won't ask for anything. Am I that unworthy of you?"

Erimond threw down his rapier in frustration.

"Don't you understand? You're a _lady_. What kind of monster would I be if I hurt you, or made you do things you don't want to do?"

"Is that it?" Somehow, a declaration of hatred would have hurt Salmakia less. "You're so damn _virtuous_ , aren't you? Just like your father!"

"What did I or my father ever do to you, Salmakia?"

"Oh, nothing at all. All you ever do is what makes you feel good about yourselves. Did you decide by yourself to be kind to the poor little orphan, or did your father order you to be?"

"Stop it right now or I'll never train with you again!"

But Salmakia could not stop even if she had wanted to. Suddenly all of her anger and pain; every last creature that had ever hurt her from the first mite that ever stung her to the Qelipah that had killed her parents, had found a home in this boy.

"I don't care!" she shouted. "I _hate_ you, Erimond, and I hate your stupid father and mother and sisters! I never asked for any of this, you all just came along and _rescued_ me to give yourselves a pat on the back when I should've died with my family! I've said it, now you've seen how horrible I am, so why don't you hit me? Use your spurs, or your rapier, cut my head clean off, _I don't care!_ "

"Have you lost your mind?" Lady Roke cried as she dragged Erimond off Salmakia a minute later. "Sylvain! Your son broke his sister's nose!"

"You know _nothing_ about my father!" Erimond shouted as he struggled in his mother's grip. "You think you know everything but you're just some stupid girl from some clan nobody's ever heard of- _ow!_ " Lady Roke had slapped him across the face so hard, one of her nails cut his cheek.

"I'm not his sister," Salmakia muttered, sitting up in the dust and wiping the blood from her nose. "And it's my fault. I made him do it."

"You don't have to defend him." Lord Roke had arrived to pull her to her feet.

She slapped his hands away.

"You don't believe me, do you? You told me to talk about my feelings, so I did. Your son was defending your reputation. Now that you've seen what I'm like, why don't you take me back to where I came from? I'm not afraid of dying or being alone, and I never wanted anything from you!"

Feeling as if the words had torn out the last of her strength, Salmakia crumpled. Lord Roke's hands were on her again, setting her upright as she closed her eyes and tried to make herself as small as she could.

"I was right about you, Salmakia." There was triumph in his voice, as if she had passed a test of his own making. "There is so much ferocity in you, and that ferocity is what convinced me that you would live. I know what it means to be angry and helpless, but there are ways to channel that anger; turn it into greatness. Erimond is leaving to attend military academy next week, and you will go with him."

The shock had made Salmakia forget to wipe her nose. She watched as the bright droplets fell to form perfect circles on the wooden platform that held the courtyard. Far away, the wind was rising.

Erimond drew a handkerchief from his sleeve and placed it gently in her hand.

"I'm so sorry, Salmakia. I should never have treated you the way I did. I'm just a coward, and you reminded me of all the things I'm afraid of. It was never your fault. None of it was."

Shame welled up inside Salmakia until it filled her entire being, and once it had nowhere else to go she began to cry for the first time since that day at the hospital.

"I'm sorry too," she sobbed. "I'm so, so sorry..."

"You're forgiven." Lord Roke's hands were on her shoulders, holding her through the tears and the screaming wind. "One day, sweetling, you will know how fetching you look dressed in rage."

* * *

 _"You are troubled, my Lady."_

 _She peers into the face of her death, and wonders how she had ever mistaken it for_ him.

 _"Lord Erimond Roke is dead. He was my brother, and I never mourned him."_

 _"The dead hold nothing against the living."_

 _Somehow, she believes him._

 _This blighted land frightens her, but she remembers that house with the tin roof and the deaths crowded around it, and everything that's left of her begins to smile._


	6. Lodestone and Willow

_He greets the boatman like an old friend._

 _The boatman's ancient eyes peer at this wonder of wonders, and he laughs with a sound like the world ending._

* * *

After no small amount of bargaining, threats and appeals to father-son love, Chevalier Aslatiel and Tialys managed to reach a compromise. Tialys would attend the military academy of nearby Clan Roke - vastly inferior to the academy of their own clan in Aslatiel's opinion, but unique in that it offered training for technicians with a basic physical training program in the evenings.

The academy turned out to be the largest and greyest building Tialys had ever seen. Once he had taken leave of his father with as little sentimentality as possible, a uniformed scholar conducted him through the stone and steel warrens, past armed guards and glass-fronted rooms where machinery purred softly, to the boys' dormitories where his new classmates sat on grey bunks and studied grey textbooks as thick as Tialys' arm.

"I am Tialys, son of Chevalier Aslatiel," he announced once the scholar had left. "I am honoured to be here among you."

The boys stared at him with the passivity of cattle. One of them snorted.

"Don't care if you're the son of Chevalier Shithead. Your bunk's in the corner."

"How dare you!" Tialys cried, for the very idea of being disrespected by one of his peers was foreign to him.

"Don't antagonise him," said a boy with glasses, peering up from a textbook labelled _Chemical Warfare in the 25th Century._ "He's a real arse sometimes. But I'm pleased to meet you all the same."

"You shut up, Alfonse," growled the first boy. "This little grub's got to learn his place. Want me to show you yours?"

It was too much for Tialys to bear. He leapt at the boy with fists raised, but his opponent seized both his wrists as if he were catching a fly. The boy twisted; Tialys gritted his teeth in pain and tried to kick, but the other boy held his spur against Tialys' shin so that kicking would mean impaling himself.

"Stop, damn it!" Alfonse shouted as he punched the other boy on the ear. He cursed, flinging Tialys to the ground just as the door swung open.

"Silence!"

As Tialys pulled himself upright, he found himself face to face with a stern-looking Gallivespian clad in the same uniform as the scholar. He wore a badge declaring him House Master, and held a willow cane in his hand.

"We're all sorry, Sir!" cried a boy near the back of the room. "Corin started a fight..."

"Don't care." The house master indicated Corin and Alfonse with his cane. "Six of the best for you. And _you_ ," he addressed Tialys, "you get twelve."

"But Sir," Alfonse had gone quite pale, "He was provoked-"

"You can trade punishments if you want," said the master silkily, and Alfonse paled even more and stared at his feet.

Tialys sat on his bunk, his stomach tying itself into knots as he listened to the faint cries coming from further down the corridor. He watched as the other two boys slunk back into the dormitory rubbing their reddened hands, and wondered just what Chevalier Aslatiel would think of him.

After what felt like an hour, the master returned and beckoned to Tialys. They walked to a little office furnished with towers of papers and a wooden desk in front of which Tialys was instructed to stand.

"Put your hands on the desk, palms up. Don't move them unless you want them broken. Do you know why I'm punishing you?"

"Because I started the fight?" Tialys ventured, feeling a little better now that he had the chance to be honest.

"Wrong. It's because I know what you are. You're sick and twisted and evil, and I never wanted you here."

The cane soared and came down across Tialys' knuckles. There was a moment of calm as he watched the red line spread, and then the pain came and he was shaking and biting his lip and wishing with all his might for the tears to sink back into his eyes.

"I'd have kept you locked up if I were your father." _Thwack!_ "A nice padded room, not an academy full of children for you to corrupt." _Thwack!_ "Gallivespians have Sitra Achra; humans don't." _Thwack!_ "That's why you started a fight on your first day, isn't it?" _Thwack!_ "I bet you'd have killed Corin if I'd let you!"

"Please, Sir!" cried Tialys. "I never meant to hurt him! He hurt me and Alfonse- _argh_!"

 _"_ Shut up!" _Thwack!_ "If you have no Sitra Achra, what does that make you?" _Thwack!_ Tialys gritted his teeth, shaking his head through the tears coursing down his cheeks. _Thwack! Thwack!_ "Damn it, what does that make you?"

" _A human!_ " Tialys screamed. "A Qelipah; an enemy; a filthy human!"

 _Thwack!_

"'A human' what, you filth?"

"A human, _Sir_! Please, I can't take it anymore!"

One more blow, and Tialys crumpled and sobbed with pain and humiliation until he choked. He knew he wasn't the son of Chevalier Aslatiel, but he wasn't a human either - he was a creature lower than dirt; a worm who had thought himself a god...

"Get out." The master grabbed him by his swollen and bloody hand, and he cried out again. "If I hear one more peep from you, I'll prove to you that Hell exists!"

Tialys ran. He did not bother to unpack or make his bed; did not bother with the questions and sympathies of his dorm-mates. All he could do was creep into the darkness between the scratchy mattress and the frayed grey blanket, and wish with all his heart that he had never been born.

* * *

"Hey," said Alfonse as Tialys gritted his teeth and tried to force himself to hold a pencil the next day. "It was real decent of you to stand up for me yesterday."

"Don't mention it," said Tialys bitterly, staring at the rags he had wrapped around the welts on his hands. The worst of it all was that he couldn't work like this, and if he couldn't work, he couldn't stay.

Alfonse dug under his bunk and offered Tialys a jar of something that smelled of pine needles.

"Here, rub this on your hands. You can have all of it."

The ointment was so soft and cool that for the first time since his arrival, Tialys smiled.

After the incident with the house master, Tialys never lacked a partner for fencing or physics assignments, and Alfonse and the dormitory boys always welcomed him when they sat in the mess hall. Every day, Tialys soon learned, was Mystery Meat Day. The greyish substance was supposed to be squirrel, but the students' guesses on its true identity ranged from cockroach to human.

"Why don't we eat Qelipot?" Alfonse wondered aloud to a group of girls as they sat and ate. "One of them could feed a clan for a year!"

"I think that's cannibalism," said a blonde girl, and another giggled.

"But it's not! Qelipot are related to monkeys, and Gallivespians to shrews. Ever heard of convergent evolution...?"

Tialys stopped listening when he noticed the blonde girl's eyes on him.

"Your father is a _murderer_!" she shouted, pointing. "He killed Madame Alouette du Fer! He belongs in _prison_!"

"Do you have any idea who you're speaking to?" Tialys sprang to his feet with enough force to send his plate skidding away. "I am Tialys, son of Chevalier Aslatiel and Madame Alouette. My mother was a brave warrior killed by Qelipot, and when I find out who started this rumour, I swear I'll beat them bloody!"

"What was he supposed to do?" Alfonse asked the girl. "Save her and leave the prisoners to die?"

"Besides, the Court declared him innocent," remarked Corin, who had apologised to Tialys three days after the beating and had thus far proven himself to be a volatile but otherwise decent friend. "Why don't you take it up with them, Beatrice?"

"Say what you will, but I know what's right and what's wrong!" cried Beatrice, and stormed off with her nose in the air.

"Cryptography students..." muttered Corin, shrugging.

Tialys sat down, furious.

"All right, I know how inexplicably funny you find my family, but the joke's up. What prisoners? What court?"

"Oh please," said Corin. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone talks about it anyway."

"Everyone talks about _what_ , Corin? You're such an-"

He trailed off when he saw the way Alfonse was staring at him. It was a look of pity and disgust and shame; the kind of look one would give an animal starving to death without understanding why.

It was the same look the doctor had given him.

"Shut up, Corin." Alfonse's voice was almost a whisper. "He really doesn't know..."

Tialys summoned up every ounce of hatred he had ever felt, and fixed it on Alfonse.

"Tell me everything, or I'll never speak to you again."

Alfonse withered under his gaze.

"Fine, I'm sorry, we all thought you knew, we just didn't want to bring it up out of politeness, see. You know about the time six months ago when the Qelipot attacked your clan with nets and captured nineteen people, right?"

"Of course! My mother died trying to save them!"

"I'm afraid that's not what happened at all. She tried, but they caught her too. Your father took a rescue party and flew to where the Qelipot were keeping them. They suffered heavy losses but they freed them in the end, only your father saw that your mother wasn't among them. They found her when they went outside. It was a sort of square, and..." Alfonse took a deep breath. "The Qelipot were burning her alive, Tialys. They'd dressed her in her uniform and tied her to a dragonfly made of straw. So your father shot his last bolt into her heart."

Tialys was shaking. The mess hall suddenly seemed tiny and far away, as though he were peering at it through a keyhole in an eternity-thick door.

" _Why_?" he choked out. "Why would you do this to me, Alfonse?"

Laughter, jeering, _anything_ would have been better than Alfonse placing a hand on his shoulder and staring with guiltless sorrow into his eyes.

"I have nothing to hide, Tialys. You can check the records in the library. Your father must've been trying to protect you. He must've thought..."

But Tialys never found out what his father must have thought. He just made it into the hallway before he collapsed and retched his daily ration of mystery meat onto the stone floor.

* * *

 _Tialys,_

 _Your silence is not fooling anyone. If you were dead, or worse, expelled, I would have been notified by now. So I ask that you find some time in your evidently busy schedule to answer my letters. In other news, my dragonfly laid a clutch of eggs yesterday. I was told she'd been fixed. When I find the breeder..._

It would be the easiest thing in the world to continue reading; to put pen to paper and write _forgive me, Father, but I need to know what_ really _happened._ But Chevalier Aslatiel had lied, and so his letter joined the ashes of the two before.

It would be the easiest thing in the world for Tialys to pretend that he was simply disturbed by the terrible thing that had been done to his mother. That he could still remember what her hands felt like; what colour her eyes had been. And yet he had to wonder if he even cared about her, and not just the fact that Chevalier Aslatiel had _lied_.

Tialys' friends understood that he was angry, and the fact that they were not at fault could do nothing to change that. So they left him to skulk the halls and empty classrooms of the college; to become a ghost while they waited helplessly for him to decide to be alive again.

There was a particular classroom that he liked best of all. He had no idea what was taught there, but it must have been something awfully exclusive because there were never more than five seats. On the front desk stood the object of Tialys' fascination: a crystal the colour of a moonless night, mounted on an ornate wooden base. He knew that there was a single string running along its upper surface, and that in a locked drawer lay a bow, which the professor in charge of the crystal would draw over the string.

Tialys soon learned to anticipate these performances. He would wait in the supply closet, pressing his ear against the keyhole to hear the soft music. The professor's face and hands would take on the exalted grace of a violinist's when he played, but the sounds emanating from the crystal were nothing like those of a violin. High or low, calm or frenzied, they carried an ancient and immeasurable sorrow, as if the stone itself were singing of its birth in the flaming bowels of the earth and the steel hands that tore its mother apart to pluck it from her womb.

And then came a day when the professor had to pause to deliver some kind of message, and Tialys crept out of the closet and took the abandoned instrument in his hands. He ran his fingers over the black crystal, felt its energy thrumming against his skin, and, trembling, placed the bow on the string.

The first tiny movement of Tialys' fingers produced a hideous screeching sound. He dropped the bow, his heart slamming against his ribcage, but nobody came. So he moved the bow again and again, and there it was - a single pure note carrying all the beauty and power of the world, and the knowledge that it had come from his own touch awoke depths within him that had until then lain dark and barren...

"Vermin! Get away! _Away_!"

The bow was torn from his hands, and then the professor slapped and shook him until his head spun.

"Do you have any idea what this instrument is, you little beast? Of course you don't! It's called a lodestone resonator, and it's for sending messages. Messages! You just sent a load of gibberish to Lady Shang of Cathay! You ought to be sent over there and scourged, maybe that'll teach you to keep your filthy paws to yourself..."

The professor expected many different reactions to his words. The most likely one was for the boy to start snivelling - he had, after all, slapped him quite hard. But Tialys did the one thing the professor did not anticipate: he straightened himself, fixed his stern blue eyes on the professor's, and spoke.

"Forgive me, Sir, but I can't make myself feel ashamed. I've just found out what I want to do with my life, after all."

* * *

 _"No, Death. I will not go with you."_

 _The boatman waits. Tialys waits. His death sits on the dock, kicking her legs._

 _"I betrayed her twice, once for love and once for fear. I will not betray her a third time."_

 _"Would you rather betray me, Chevalier? Me, who came into the world beside you? Me, who lifted you out of the sky?"_

 _His death is frightened. So he kisses her on the forehead like he would have kissed the child, only there should have been smooth skin and golden locks against his lips, not bones and decay and so much cold._

 _"I've betrayed your kind a hundred times, sweetling. Once more shouldn't matter."_


End file.
